J.C. Newman Cigar Co. is shipping the Yagua and Diamond Crown Black Diamond cigars for the last time in 2025.
“It continues to shock me that Yagua has developed a cult-like following,” fourth-generation owner Drew Newman said in a press release. “I didn’t make Yagua to sell. In fact, I didn’t think that cigar enthusiasts would like Yagua because it breaks all of the cigar-making rules. Yagua is misshapen and unattractive. We roll it with underfermented tobacco, and no two Yagua are alike.”
Yagua is a recreation of a farm-rolled cigar that Lazaro Lopez, general manager of the J.C. Newman PENSA cigar factory in Nicaragua, remembers his grandfather making at his family’s tobacco farm in Cuba in the 1940s.
Diamond Crown Black Diamond was introduced in 2016, and is hand rolled in Tabacalera A. Fuente in the Dominican Republic. It features a Connecticut Havana wrapper with a blend of Dominican binder and filler tobaccos.
“My grandfather, Stanford J. Newman, told me that his father, J.C. Newman taught him that we should aim to do something better every day,” Newman said in the same presser. “Although our Diamond Crown Black Diamond cigars have been savored by cigar enthusiasts around the world for six years, I was not satisfied and wanted to make them better.”
